The stars of the videos Frank Francesco spends his days making are most often large rats, foraging among floating debris.
There's almost always an air of mystery, beginning with the opening scene. An eerie cloud of steam and gas hangs low over a dark, flowing stream. The camera inches forward, shifting its focus from side to side, from top to bottom - always looking for something.
On a recent Tuesday it discovered a large rock that was damming up the stream and threatening to cause a big stink.
On this day the camera is under Roosevelt Boulevard, in a sewer main. Francesco isn't down there with it. He's inside a nearby truck, one of five the city uses to inspect the construction quality of new sewer mains and search for problems in old ones, many of which have been used for more than a century.
"Look at the brickwork - it is a work of art," he said as he pressed buttons to send instructions to the camera in the century-old sewer.
Remote-controlled cameras are just one example of how new and developing technologies are helping to protect a precious commodity that attracts public attention only when a crisis erupts - such as the water contamination that sickened 400,000 people in Milwaukee in 1993, or this summer's drought in much of the Northeast.
New technology is crucial to helping the Philadelphia Water Department keep clean water flowing through an aging network of mains and pipes. It enables the city to collect sewage and pump water back into the rivers that is far cleaner after sewage treatment than what the city initially took out. And it's a big part of the water department's success in keeping its rates well below those in the suburbs.
Increasingly, water and sewer management has gone high-tech. For example:
Computers now analyze minute vibrations in huge electric pump motors to detect problems before $10,000 worth of bearings are destroyed or other problems cause a ripple of breakdowns.
New metals and computer technology are turning sewer sludge into useful organic compost that makes farms and backyard vegetable gardens more fertile and resistant to drought and transforms ugly strip mines into bucolic pastures.
Computers and related technology are creating a far more accurate and accessible record of what is under city streets, which holds the promise of dramatically reducing the number of times that streets must be torn up to repair water, sewer, telephone, gas and cable television lines.
